Continuo Connect — Profile // La Nuova Musica

La Nuova Musica (LNM) is a vocal and instrumental ensemble and registered UK charity (1144998) dedicated to the music of the Baroque and Classical periods, led by acclaimed director David Bates. Over the past fifteen years LNM has established itself as ‘one of the most exciting consorts in the early music field’ (BBC Radio 3). We have performed repertoire from Monteverdi to Mozart in reputed festivals and houses across Europe and perform regularly at St John’s Smith Square, London, where we focus on large scale repertoire such as Haydn’s Creation or Handel’s Messiah, at Wigmore Hall where our performances centre on chamber music and at the London Handel Festival we have now performed eight of Handel’s Oratorios over as many years.

In addition to our live performances, we have recorded several discs including six albums for Harmonia Mundi. We are delighted to be collaborating with the boutique label Pentatone and released Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in 2019 and Handel’s Unsung Heroes in 2021, a disc dedicated to highlighting the instrumental virtuosi in Handel’s work https://www.classical-music.com/reviews/opera/handels-unsung-heroes/. We finished recording our next disc, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, in November 2022, following our inaugural BBC Prom in July 2022.

LNM has an ongoing aspiration to champion living composers as fervently as established baroque and classical masters in order to explore parallels between the two worlds. Our Judith and Holofernes project will be the latest in our commissioning series which programmes new works to sit alongside our specialist repertoire. We have worked closely with several composers as part of these projects, including Nico Muhly (Lichfield Festival and Wigmore Hall), Luke Styles (Foundling Museum London and Aldeburgh Music Suffolk), Anna Thorvaldsdottir, (Spitalfields Winter Festival London), Edmund Finnis (St John’s Smith Square) and Cassandra Miller (Wigmore Hall).